


In Corolla

by Hopetohell



Series: End of the World [3]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Gore, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Other, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:42:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26746075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hopetohell/pseuds/Hopetohell
Summary: Death is a doorway. And when you fall in one world, perhaps you’ll rise in the next.
Relationships: August Walker/Original Character(s)
Series: End of the World [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856770
Comments: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “And no one was gonna come and get me  
> There wasn't anybody gonna know  
> Even though I leave a trail of burned things in my wake  
> Every single place I go”  
> —The Mountain Goats, “In Corolla”

**“You were wrong when you said everything’s gonna be alright.”  
—Built to Spill**

His body isn’t even cold. 

His body isn’t even cold and you’re still there, still holding onto him like at any moment he’ll tip his head back onto your shoulder, huff out a breathless laugh of _come on, let’s get back to it. Long way to go._

He’s still warm, and you could imagine that he’s only sleeping, limbs still pliant, head heavy as he dreams. 

He’s still warm when they come for you, those silhouettes that resolve into Apostles who are _so very pleased_ to see you here. 

He’s still warm when they bind you and carry you away, when they drag him along behind by his heels. 

They ask you, _how did he do it? Who did he work with? Why did he cut us out?_

You could give them the truth, keep his secrets because in fact you do not know, stay here in this limbo and wait on a rescue that isn’t coming. Wait, and be taken apart piece by piece until they finally believe you know nothing. 

Or you could lie, and if the lie is good enough that’ll be the end of it. Oh it’ll hurt, _Christ_ it’ll hurt, you know because you’ve trained some of them, taught them how to work their subject open bit by bit. But it’ll be quicker, maybe even cleaner, and then you can get to the business of dying properly. 

It hurts exactly as much as you thought it would. You know the strength of the signal from nerve to brain, how to overlap the signal to double and triple it, how to keep your subject conscious beyond what should be possible. Turns out your students know too. 

_How did he do it?_ Poison, you tell them. Something insidious, easily dispersed. No, you don’t know what kind, only that it was fast. Effective. Airborne. (You’d stayed inside for weeks after, stroking his sweaty hair, changing his bandages. Fingering the edges of a wound that should’ve killed him. He never told you what he’d really done and you’d never asked. The how was unimportant compared to what came after). 

_They force something down your throat, something that lights up your nerves but leaves your limbs heavy, sluggish. They don’t even have to tie you down, but they do it anyway. They appreciate the aesthetic, the look of you helpless and hopeless. They take and take and take, and for a while there are no questions._

You’d always focused on the dichotomy of punishment and praise, of using your best words to thank them for the gift of their flesh. Perhaps your students missed that lesson. They take everything from you, and it doesn’t matter because it can’t matter. 

_Who did he work with?_ Symon, who tried to betray Walker, and went all to pieces for it. Ross, whereabouts unknown but last seen raising hell somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. This you know, and this you give up because it doesn’t much matter anymore, and because you are so very tired. You didn’t realize it would hurt this much, for this long. Oh, you taught your students well. 

_You taught them anatomy and physiology as best you knew how, from long experience. You’d separated the very nerves from your subject’s flesh, explained the nature and purpose of their branching paths. How to block or boost the signal. How to turn the theoretical pain of an exposed nerve into a practical application of suffering._

They don’t believe you when you cry that it’s too much, when you try to take yourself under so you can rest. All you want is rest, just for a little while. 

_He’d told you a little about it, when you’d asked. Your hands on him soft and soothing as you’d teased the sordid story of his torment from him. You’d kept him balanced on that knife’s edge between too much and not enough, and in the spaces between his cries of pleasure he’d told you all about what hurt the most._

_Why did he cut us out?_ Because you all are a bunch of stupid, small-minded fucks who backed the wrong horse and you would’ve lost it _all_ if not for him. Because Solomon Lane wanted vengeance, and August fucking Walker wanted to save the world. 

You’d wondered, when he dropped off the grid for so long. You’d wondered, and though you were busy with your own schemes you’d kept the channel open just in case. Then one day you received a message. _Time to get to work._

They bring him to you, cold and stiff and blue, and hold your head steady in their hands. You watch as they hollow him out so they can read your fortune in his entrails. _It doesn’t look good._ They pass hooks through your flesh to keep you spread and strained, to keep your secrets out in the open air. You are so very tired, and there is so little of you left. 

You’re tired, they’re tired, and they must be running out of time. Every day the questions grow more frantic, every day they take a little more of you. Until one day they file into the room to look down on your wet red flesh and tell you _end of the road, it’s been fun, tell your devils we sent you._ They slit your throat, and with a sigh you lay your head to rest.


	2. Chapter 2

**Afterlife (good ghosts)**

They told you hell would be all fire and brimstone, all heat and screams and choking thick smoke. They looked down at your wide-eyed open stare and promised you eternal torment at the hands of some pitchfork-wielding devil. 

They lied. 

Hell is cold, and quiet, and above all empty. Sometimes you swear you hear a voice on the wind, but your senses are wrapped in cotton wool and you can’t be sure. It’s a bit like being on the moon, if the moon was always suffused with grey light. No sky, no sea, no Walker. It was too much to hope for that you’d at least end up in the same circle, for all you’d wound your lives together. 

You weren’t the one who was supposed to die bloody. You were out of the game, building something of your own, when the message came through. _Time to get to work._ And sure, it had been a while when you met him at the docks in Copenhagen, but he looked terrible. Not just the missing eye, that was your fault and your gift to him. No, he’d been...fragile. 

Maybe you were fragile too. Maybe you filled in the missing pieces of one another. And now the wind whistles through the gaps, blows cold grit inside you. Oh, how it burns, how it bypasses your skin to scrape right against your raw and writhing insides. 

This is a hell of your own devising. You’re pretty sure of that, anyway. But you always were taught that if you could move, if you could think, then you could act. And if hell is missing its fire and brimstone, maybe its other rules are different too. 

**What do you think you’re doing?** It’s a soft, deep whisper, rain falling onto mossy stones. **Are you really trying to leave? Where will you go? You have nothing. Nobody. No body.**

If nothing else, you have your spite. It’s carried you before, and it can carry you again. But where do you go from here? _To the source._ If you listen hard, you can hear the barest whisper on the wind. _We go back to the beginning. Let’s get the fuck out of this shithole._

It’s as good a plan as any. Find the wind’s source, find August, find the door. And at this point, anyway, what have you got to lose?

—-  
 **All the rivers in Colorado**

The river is shallow, its surface mirrored like glass. You can see yourself reflected in it and there must be some trick of the light, because you can’t see any of the holes you swear you feel all over your body. You are solid, whole, just like you remember yourself before everything went wrong. 

Curious. 

The wind whistles and whispers a lullaby to lay you down in the river, to draw the cold clear water up over your head. You’re not afraid, after all, you’re already dead. What does it matter?

_Don’t._

You’re so tired. Just rest. Just **forget.** Let the river take you under, let it weigh down your lungs with water. Settle here on the riverbed. Let the light filter down like a dream. Forget, forget. 

_Remember._ It’s muffled but you can hear that flat American accent, warped through wind and water and something strange, but still recognizably him. 

_Remember me. Remember us. Remember tooth and claw and coffee at sunrise. Remember my fingers inside you, and yours in me. Remember blood and bone and the taste of snow._

And you remember. 

You remember the first time and the last, you remember when you showed him your talents and he cried for more. You remember sunlight on the citadel and the taste of fog rolling rich against your tongue. You remember light beyond the breakers. A promise, the only one you’d ever really made. 

_I will find you. Hell or high water, I will find you._

You rise, spluttering and coughing, breathing out through a haze of water. You rise, slapping your hands against the river’s surface like you could hurt it. 

You rise. 

The wind tears at you, pressing grit into your bones, your eyes, your everything but it doesn’t matter. You made a promise, damn it, and you are going to keep it. There are whispers on the wind, and as you step out onto the riverbank you can hear them so much more clearly. _This way. This way. Nearly there._


	3. Chapter 3

**A little light (in August)**

He hangs suspended, cobwebbed in a nest of barbed wire. He is pulled taut, bound all about, the barbed points digging into him so very cruelly. It sends a spreading warmth through you to see him strong even like this, thousands of tiny cuts all over, blood smeared over his skin from his writhing. To see him fight against his bonds, to see his refusal to quit even in the face of hopelessness. To see his eyes so bright with pain and defiance that they seem to glow. 

His eyes. 

Curious. 

He’s not fragile now. God, the more the barbs cut at him, the more strongly he twists and writhes, his head thrown back, the column of his throat torn and bloody. He frees a hand, digs into his navel and _pulls,_ tearing a finger-wide strip of flesh up to his sternum. He hangs there, mouth opening soundlessly around phantom sounds of pain, radiant with the ecstasy of the possessed. He reaches for the hollow of his throat, fingering the edges of the wound like he’s stroking a lover. 

**Don’t you think he belongs here? Isn’t he happy?**

He sees you then, his mouth working around the words he can’t say with his throat torn out. 

“Love.” Your voice sounds small, dry. Husked with shock and fear and just the smallest curl of pleasure. He hears it, and his eyes widen fractionally. Were it you who’d bound him there, you would sing his praises for how well he’d borne the torment. You’d tell him good, so good, and so you do but the words aren’t all yours, are they? Something in the wind amplifies and twists your words, renders you cruel when all you mean is to admire his grit, his endurance. 

His entire body blinks, fuzzes out of existence for a moment. Resets. He is whole and clean. He speaks your name. _Hammond. Avery. Please._

And the barbs tear at him again.

—-  
 **Parts of the whole**

It wasn’t enough. The time you had, it was more than you deserved and it still wasn’t enough. But you are both stubborn, aren’t you? Unwilling (unable) to leave well enough alone. You bound yourself to him, the knots tightening slowly, so slowly you didn’t realize what was happening until you were irrevocably tied together. 

You showed him nerve and bone and wet squelching flesh, showed him how to carry his subject through it awake, alert. Showed him how it felt and though he gasped and cried he never asked to stop. 

You remember your bare feet sinking into the snow, steps short and heavy as you hauled him in a fireman’s carry, his guts draped warm and stinking over your arms, his face pale. _Please._

Blood on snow. 

Sipping coffee in the early morning, watching the world wake up. Checking the news as every day the death toll rose a little higher. 

_Please, love, please_ as you writhed on his hand, grinding his bones together but oh he was radiant. 

You reach for him. 

Sitting in the warm sand, listening to the rattle in his chest. _It’s alright. It’s alright. It’ll be alright._

Coffee in Vienna. You laid your fingers on his wrist and he threw his cup aside. 

They gave you a choice, down there in the dark. _Either you do it, or we will._ Like you’d trust anyone else to take him apart. Like you’d entrust anyone else with this greatest of gifts. You picked up the scalpel and left your mark. 

A promise. _I will find you._

Your fingers brush his. The touch of his skin is electric. 

He falls, tangling you in his web of blood and wire. You tear at the wire, heedless of the barbs biting into your hands. His lips are dry, cracked, coppery. He cradles your face in shaking hands. “I—“

_I am here. I am here._


	4. Chapter 4

**I can hear music**

How long? Time is strange here. The lights are always on, the light pale and grey but always, always present. He blinks and fuzzes, clings to you with shaking hands until he steadies. His kiss is bloody and you sigh into it, whispering. _I told you. I told you. I will find you. I will always find you._

“I thought you were going to blind me.” The non-sequitur throws you for a moment. “I thought your face would be the last thing I ever saw. I should’ve died there. I thought—“

He’s distracted, for a moment, by the kiss you press onto him then. By the words you breathe into him that you don’t quite know how to say. By the memory that arcs across your mind, of how you’d traded every fluorescent bulb in the house for incandescent, the way you’d always step louder than you would naturally. The comedown is always hard and he’s been riding that perfect wave of agony for so long it’s a wonder he can speak at all. 

“I would have. If there was no other way, I would have. Even then. It couldn’t have been anyone else.” It’s as much of an admission as you’ve ever made. He sighs and leans his weight back against you. _Oh,_ you’d forgotten the warm weight, the heft of him in his prime. 

You think about it then, all the things you could do in these bodies, these marvelous dead shells that seem to reflect the best parts of you both. You’re whole and strong, well-fed and sharp like knives. It’s curious, but it also makes a sort of sense. Why drop a man from one story up when you can take the stairs and drop him from the tenth floor? Why start with a broken body when you can make it new and break it over and over and over? It’s what you would do, if you knew how. 

You think about it, but he’s drifting in your arms. It’s like the last time you held him, but he breathes easy now, relaxes and sighs while you work bloodied hands through his hair. Time is strange here. He could’ve hung there in those wires for a day, a year, a lifetime and you’d have no way of knowing. Could only mark time by the way he blinked and reset to start the cycle anew. 

You sit, and hold him close, and wonder what to do next, what will happen when you get back, _if_ you can get back. It hits you, then, that maybe you can’t, that maybe when you leave here you’ll have nowhere to go, no living body to get into. Awfully hard to live with no guts and no blood. _Worry about it later._ For a little while, just enjoy being here. Whole. Together. 

—-  
 **A high and lonesome sound (gods and monsters)**

**Should have left him there. Should have left him to pay penance. Should have forgotten.**

There’s cruelty in the wind and it’s not your usual brand but something insidious. It says leave him here, the weak and worthless creature. He stirs, rolling his shoulders to push himself up into your grip. Your hands are too tight, fingertips pulsing against his skin with every breath, every pump of blood that washes out from your heart. 

**Why follow? You make each other weak. You’d still be alive if not for him.** Yeah, maybe. Maybe you’d have retired for good, raised a pack of kids. Sounds like a nightmare. And it’s not—it’s not making each other weak. It’s filling in the gaps. Making one and one still equal one. _You’re the trellis, I’m the vine_.

“Ellis? Huh? Who’s that?” He’s muzzy, still languorous in the circle of your arms, somehow content on this endless patch of bare earth. This can’t last forever; the air has that sharp ozone taste like moments before a lightning strike and you feel the prickle of eyes at your back. It makes the predator in you sit up and take notice, makes you want to snap and bite. 

**And bite, and bite, and tear that pretty throat out with your teeth. And when you—**

“The fuck is that?” He’s alert now, leaning forward out and away from you but there’s that hand that comes back to rest on your thigh, that here I am, that next step in the dance you’ve been doing for years. There’s nothing to see out there, nothing but—wait. There is something, dashing between the drops of rain that suddenly sling forward on the dry earth. Something big and many-limbed, something only visible by the negative space it leaves where the raindrops don’t fall. 

You think about hellbeasts, about stories told in the dark, about children playing a game of one-upmanship around the embers of a dying fire. Stories, maybe, but they still held a kernel of truth like all stories do. The beast that approaches you now isn’t made of fire or tar or anything like you remember (or anything at all, it seems like, since you still can’t even see it properly). But there’s a story creeping along at the back of your mind, about a man who slew a monster from the inside out. 

And there’s Walker, nodding, climbing to his feet like he hears you, sure and steady just like you remember him at his best. He rolls his shoulders, shakes out his arms. And as he runs headlong at the creature you swear he shines with a web of silver. He disappears for a moment, a handful of heartbeats where you swear and shake with worry, but he reappears in that silver web, in that halo of razor wire that cuts and tears at him, that sends him to his knees as he fuzzes, blinks, resets. And he looks up at you then, eyes wide, and asks you a question you can’t answer.


	5. Chapter 5

**See it untame itself**

Walker is a weapon in the way that the sun is bright, or water is wet. He simply _is,_ inexorable and unquestionable. And if you continue the sun metaphor, he _burns_. He takes the wires that seem to burst from his very blood and makes of them a halo, a raincloud, a storm that scythes through everything in his path. And he pays the cost, oh how he pays, his flesh tearing and knitting without even a scar to mark his toils. 

He is a weapon, and when the rains roll forward on the plains and the strange unknowable creatures emerge to hunt, he tears at them with the fire and fury that made you take him to your bed all those years ago. He tears at them, empties himself of everything except the fight, and when he asks you for the how and why of it you still can’t answer. 

It stings a little, knowing that he’s whole because that’s how he sees the best version of himself, because your gift is no longer evident on his face. He has two eyes again, fine clear eyes that see everything. It stings a little, until he places his upturned palm in yours and shows you the silvery scar, the line where he’d bitten loose the wire you gave him, the wire that was the key to his escape. “I carry you with me,” he whispers, bowing his head as you wind the wires tight about him. 

You wonder, as you walk endlessly across these featureless plains, if you have some strange gift as well. Wonder if— _what was that?_ You could’ve sworn he said something about daffodils but when he looks at you, startled, it’s plain he hasn’t said anything at all. 

**You get nothing. You aren’t even supposed to be here.**

_You’re right where you’re supposed to be._

The scarred, empty space on your hand itches and burns and weeps lymph like it happened only yesterday. It leaves shining trails on his skin, and when he grabs your hand to lick and suck at the empty space it sends an icy thrill straight through your core, sends you gasping against him like you’re rising from the depths. 

_No, it was daisies. Small ones, wild in the meadow where he realized he was dying._

He licks at you like he could get you inside him, like you could wind around his bones. And you bite at him in return, hard, harder, until his skin splits and you taste metal. And it’s too fast, harsh like the diesel hum of the first morning train, howling in sudden wild desperation like if he slows for even a second you’ll slip away. It’s too fast, and it burns as he slides inside you, but it’s home. You are home, and as he gasps breathless into your mouth you hear it. 

_Coffee slopped over his hand, over his cuff, daisies, your grip sure around the scalpel, yes yes yes love I thought I’d lost you, boundless meadows, stay, won’t you stay, won’t you_

**Fall.**

—-  
 **No way out (wouldn’t if you could)**

In time it becomes apparent that there _is_ no door. The way into hell is an aperture, a momentary pinhole through a rubber band. You passed through and it sealed itself shut behind you, and you are trapped. 

It’s not so bad. There is a whole strange world here, all emptiness and cold and rain. You come to the river again as it bends and winds its way about the landscape. **Should’ve drowned.** But you are stubborn; you are stubborn and strong and you wander endlessly in search of what you have come to realize is an impossible goal. 

There’s no way to know what it’s like in the waking world, only that you are no longer in it. Only that your bodies were left hollow, violated and eviscerated and cold on the table. If you left the world a better place then fine, but that was always more August’s thing. You wanted to get at the small dark heart of things, to peel back skin and muscle to find the secret mechanisms that made people tick. 

You showed him once, pins through the flesh between the fine bones of his hands, fixing them to the arms of his chair as your knelt between his legs, as you rewarded stillness with licks and sucks and little bites that made his thighs tremble with the effort of holding back, but he did it for you. For you. _You never found the ticking core of me because it was always in the open, always in your hand._

He watches you often, openly, as though he can hear your thoughts. You sit cross-legged drawing sigils in the dirt with a fingertip, and glance up to find him making the same marks, not with a finger but with the end of a wire that protrudes from his flesh. A fat drop of blood wells at the emergence point, rolls down the wire, soaks into the soil. And you feel it, a rumbling and grinding deep down in the earth. 

Curious. 

You bite at the end of your own finger, tearing the skin just a touch with your sharp teeth. An answering drop falls into the marks you left on the ground, soaks in. You think of daisies, and find a flower suddenly pushing its way up before your eyes. You think of meadows, and watch as more wires emerge from August’s hands, as drops of blood roll down them to the earth. The rumbling intensifies. And you’re tearing at your own hands now, frenzied with the need to know, to see, grasping the razored wire that August exudes like spider silk. Blood patters down like rain and you think of meadows, of daisies and red paintbrush and lambs’ ears. And all around you, flowers bloom.


	6. Chapter 6

**The heart that you call home**

What is there left for you to do but dream? Here, in a meadow of your own making, earth wet with blood, you dream. August doesn’t dream, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t even move. But he watches, rolls his shoulders and sinks down beside you. And you may be dreaming but you watch, as well, looking for patterns in the flowers that bloom all around you, little meadow daisies that shouldn’t exist here. 

In the dream you’re back in Vienna, in the third-floor workroom where you first met August, where your stars changed. Where he stood, threads of something dark running through him while he watched you work. How you’d wanted to pull him open, how you’d wanted to see him bloom and spark under your hands.

And he’s there, suddenly, on the table. He is wild-eyed and wanton, rolling his hips upward even as you’ve got both arms buried in his guts, searching for something inside him that ticks and hums. His scars shine and his empty eye socket drips ichor down his cheek—but no, that’s not right. That hasn't happened yet. He turns his face to yours and speaks in someone else’s voice. _When you find it what will you do? Will you pass the threshold? Will you push on into the unknown? Will you **fail,** or will you open your hands and find something precious there?_

It’s all illogical, unreasonable, unbearably ridiculous and you find yourself having trouble handling it. August seems to give no fucks, and isn’t that funny, that here he holds steady in a way he never could before. Here he fights monsters, and he bleeds for you, and if he doesn’t like or understand his new talent then at least he accepts it as his due. He breaks again and again and again, bursting into halos of wire, and it is all for you. 

And you, you draw the patterns, although you do not yet understand. It’s fine, you have nothing but time here, but it tears at you to not know. To see the cause and the effect and still not know what it means. 

You think about doorways, as you’re tracing patterns in the dirt again. There doesn’t seem to be any end to this place, nowhere you could dig your fingers into the edge of the world and tear a hole. Nothing, not wind or water, not even the faint flutter of wings, suggests any way out. **Don’t try it.** _Do you think it’s possible?_ No, not so much, not from what you’ve seen so far, and you tell him this as he’s mimicking your patterns, seemingly unconsciously. 

“Have you tried,” he says, voice hoarse from screaming, “have you tried making a door?” It’s ridiculous, verging on stupid, and no, you _haven’t fucking tried making a door,_ but. Why not? It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened here. **It’s impossible. There is no doorway because there is no boundary to this place.**

But wait. There are boundaries. There’s up and down, there’s the river, there’s the inside and the outside of you. And a doorway is just a passage from one side to another. You look at the doodles you’ve made in the dirt. _Looks pretty door-like to me._

And just like that, you feel the click of something opening in your mind. August stares, transfixed, as though the thought hangs visible in the air. _Maybe it’s not so **impossible** after all. _


	7. Chapter 7

**Between door and doorframe**

A door is made of these: an arch, first of all, man-height, traced at August’s feet while he sits cross-legged and bleeds into the dirt. Blood, yours and his, as much as you can spare. More than you’d think you could give and still stand upright. Flowers that dot the earth where stray drops fell, where your mind wandered back to the meadow. A memory of a heavy wooden door barred with iron, the door to the parish school you’d attended all those long years ago. It marks inside from outside, innocence from anger. It should be enough, for Christ’s sake. 

But nothing happens. 

August drips blood from his fingertips down to the soil where it collects in the lines you'd drawn; he bleeds and shines and waits on your word but nothing happens. 

It’s not enough. “What did you use?” His voice is rusted and bone deep; you’d call it weary if you couldn’t see how very intently he watches. And he sees so much, maybe more than you’d credited him for. He sees the tilt of your hand as you shake it clean; he sees a door to a place in your mind that he can’t access. But the shape of it is there and he presses against it; in your mind he strokes softly across its surface and 

**Don’t.**

It’s not the wooden door that’s the right one. It’s this: Metal, peeling paint, double-hinged, little streaks of blood from where you’d gone in and out, where you’d left them writhing on the table while you went to see the sun come up. You see it from the inside as he sees it from the outside; **it’s not going to happen,** _it’s already happening,_ there’s a door in the ground and it opens into the fathomless earth. 

The wind rises and it presses grit into your skin, your eyes, the drawn lines that border the door. There is anger on the wind, and fear, and **how dare you, how dare you, this is not for you** but though you are not fearless you are all courage, and August is much the same. 

His hand is warm when you grasp it, warm and shot through with wires that bite and bind your flesh to his. “Are you ready?” The wind whips at your words, tries to take them from you but he hears them anyway.

_“Fuck, no,”_ but he is savage with it; he has that look in his eye that says he could burn the world. “But I’ll find you. No matter what, I will find you.”

And you look into the fathomless earth, at your toes that hang over the precipice, and together you fall. 

—-  
 **Epilogue (what was so important for you here?)**

It’s dark. There are disconnected sounds: wet squelching, footsteps, your own measured breaths. You stay still because any second now— _there we go._ The generator kicks to life and you look down at the table, at your arm buried to the elbow in someone’s belly. 

The footsteps start up again, pausing at the other end of the table. There’s a man there, the flames of hell itself shining in his eyes. “The name‘s Walker,” he says, and when you hold out a bloody hand to him he takes it.


End file.
